The Great Outsider.
The man, the furniture and the pictures, immortalised by Horst P. Horst.
The line between contemporary art and interior decoration has rarely been so beautifully blurred as 1966, when Diana Vreeland sent Horst P. Horst to shoot American artist ‘Cy’ Twombly at home in his palazzo in Rome. ‘Roman Classic Surprise’ was part of an ongoing series in Vogue showcasing beautiful homes and people around the world—those with, according to Vreeland, “the taste and talent and originality to create a rare ambiance in their daily lives.” In each article, fashion photographer Horst would avoid ‘styling’ or rearranging furniture to capture the way the subject truly lived and it was through his lens that we discover the private world of Cy Twombly, one of the most sophisticated and emotional painters of the 20th century.
Often described as one of the great outsiders of contemporary art, Twombly lived life to the beat of his own drum. In 1957, he abandoned New York for Rome, a highly unusual move at the time as the entire art world was gravitating in the opposite direction. And as his friends, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper John paved the way from Abstract Expressionism to Pop and Minimal art, Twombly—already enamoured of the myths and history of the Mediterranean—focussed on the beauty of his Italian surroundings, albeit with a good dose of graffiti, sexual imagery and child-like scrawls.
Twombly and his wife, the Italian aristocrat painter Tatiana Franchetti, are immortalised by Horst as they float through an enfilade of rooms in their 17th-century palazzo, dressed with casual sophistication and cast in a patrician light. Most unusual is that the artist even agreed to the Vogue shoot in the first place. Not only was Twombly deeply private and disdainful of the press, it was not the done thing for an American male artist to sit for a series of photos on interior decoration.
Not only was Twombly deeply private and disdainful of the press, it was not the done thing for an American male artist to sit for a series on interior decoration.
When Nest magazine published a series of outtakes from the shoot in 2003, celebrating Twombly as a great interior decorator, the managing editor, Paul B. Franklin, said: “The Horst-Twombly connection in Vogue was the meeting of two distinct, and distinctly different but equally captivating aesthetic worlds: the young rebel yet chic painter and the impeccably elegant, if older, photographer-aesthete.” Vreeland’s orchestration of the sitting was genius.
Writer and ex-British diplomat Valentine ‘Nick’ Lawford, who accompanied Horst to write the article, claimed at the time: “The apartment is indescribable in terms of decoration, if only because its contents are in a continual process of removal and replacement.” Over graphic-patterned floors, randomly placed classical busts and suites of neo-Egyptian furniture engage in a perpetual state of surrealist play. The palazzo’s walls are covered in colossal Twombly works. Between the scale of the canvases and the negative space surrounding Twombly’s high-pigment smears, smudges and drips, it’s not always clear where wall finishes and canvas begins. Paintings become decoration just as antiques become works of art.
The year of ‘Roman Classic Surprise’ signified a radical change of direction for Twombly, from classically inspired, predominantly white-ground canvases to the iconic ‘blackboard’ paintings between 1966 and 1971. (A work from that series sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2015 for $70.5 million). The mythical and literary themes of the artist’s beloved Mediterranean, however, were never far away and continued to feature prominently throughout the remainder of his career, in monumentally scaled series like Fifty Days at Ilium (1978) and Lepanto (2001), a spirit eloquently captured by Horst.
From a story originally published in Vogue Living.
Photography: Horst P. Horst.
